“Aside from water, tea is perhaps the most frequently consumed beverage in the world.”

All tea comes from Camellia sinensis, a plant native to the southwest of China. Originally Camellia plants grew as very tall trees but today the plant is grown to the size of a bushy shrub to make leaf harvesting easier. Some varieties of tea such as Puerh are still harvested from wild trees that are centuries old, growing in ancient forests alongside camphor trees. Right now as I sit writing this I’m sipping a Puerh tea aged and fermented for the last 18 years that was harvested from such a forest.

“Tea has numerous health benefits and originally was consumed as medicine rather than daily leisure beverage.”

In Chinese though we say that food and medicine are of the same origin and tea is no different!Modern research has confirmed numerous benefits from regular tea drinking and a study published this past March reconfirmed something people may find surprising – tea drinking is good for your bones.

This study found, “beneficial effects of tea consumption on [bone mineral density], especially in the lumbar spine, hip, [and other locations].” What is particularly interesting about this study is that it was a meta-analysis, in other words it pooled information from numerous other published articles and included information on over 12,000 participants. To read the original study please click here.

The exact reasons for the benefit to bone health is yet unknown, but we do know that tea is high in polyphenols, in particular catechins and epicatechins. These compounds have been shown to have significant anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties.

Tea is also a good natural source of fluoride, which may explain why tea drinking is associated with greater dental health (with the exception of possible cosmetic staining of the teeth) and lowered risk of oral cancers. While the full reasons for why tea is healthy are still being discovered, there seems to be general consensus that it is.”